Life Update! {John Mayer Concert and A Question for You}

This post may be long, and will probably ramble some. In it, I am going to talk about things going on in my life, and some changes I'm considering for the blog. I'm also going to do a little round up of some other posts that fit here. The first big thing is:

Write On! Teen Writing Conference

I started writing this a a short segment for this post, but it got too long, so I published it in a separate post, which you can read here.


John Mayer Concert

In mid July, I attended a John Mayer concert in Vancouver, WA, not far from Portland, OR. I really enjoyed it, and it was a ton of fun. I'm not a huge John Mayer fan (unlike my mom, which is why we were there), but I really like his Born and Raised album, and he sung a lot of songs from it, since this is the Born and Raised tour.

Other Life Stuff

We are getting ready to start school again in about two weeks.  My mom went back to work (she works at a community college, and gets most of the summer off) today, and that always means that fall will be here soon. After school starts, I'll do a post about all the new curriculum and stuff. On Friday, I'm going to kick off the Homeschool Friday subjects posts with English.

Blog Stuff

I hope to participate in the 100 for 10 challenge put on by Go Teen Writers this year. Instead of writing one big fictional project, I am going to try to write and publish a a blog post every day. Regular blog posts like this one will count, but there will probably be some flash fiction in there, and who knows what else. My question for is is this: Do you think I should do that on this blog, or should I create a separate blog of the purpose of doing this. After this is over, I would hopefully still use that blog for flash fiction, non-fiction pieces, and other non blog postish writing. That's what I'm leaning towards at the moments, but I would like to know what you think. Please, let me know in the comments!

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Write On! Teen Writing Conference

Way back in the end of June, I attended the wonderful Write On! Teen Writing Conference at a local bookstore. Here are some of my thoughts on the experience.

First of all, I loved all the sessions I went to. The first one, which was run by a local improv teacher, was not one I was super excited about. I am not a huge fan of doing any acting type stuff (or really even talking) in front of a bunch of people I don't know. It ended up being my favorite break out session of the day however, since that was not how it went at all. She (the woman leading) taught us a bunch of great exercises for coming up with everything from plots to characters to settings. We practiced them as group games, which were very nonthreatening, and then she helped us adapt them for personal use. We then practiced writing using each of those techniques.

The second breakout session I went to was a bunch of short writing exercises. He would give us a prompt to write from for 60 seconds (such as "As a writer, I have learned," or "I noticed"), and then he would ask each of us to read a sentence or two that we wrote. We would then briefly discuss each person's writing, or the idea they were talking about. At first this made me nervous, but everybody did it, and sometimes we would have a wonderful, well written,  very articulate observation on life or writing, and sometimes it would be "I noticed an oddly large quantity of apples on the trees for so late in the year." (That was a real sentence I wrote that hour. :)) He made us all come out of our shells a little, and I wrote some pieces I really liked.

The third breakout session I attended was by Nick James, whose book, Skyship Academy: The Pearl Wars, I reviewed here. It was interesting, and he had some good ideas about how to show and not tell, but there was nothing earth shaking in that session. :)

I'm going to end this post with a quote the second breakout session leader gave us, which I really liked, and found thought provoking. Let me know what you think about it in the comments.

It's better to have failed as a novelist then to have succeeded as anything else.

                                            - George Orwell

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More Posts Will Come Soon! Plus, Music I'm Listening To...

Lately, it feels like the majority of my posts on here are about how busy I am, and not about books and writing. Here is another update on my very busy summer! :)

I haven't been posting a lot lately, but I have lots of half written blog posts waiting to be finished. I have numerous book reviews coming with in the next month or two, so look for that. I have a partially written post about the teen writing conference I attended last month, and another about the John Mayer concert I attended last week.

I have some other posts coming too. I have a few more to write about the books and authors that made me a reader, and a more serious one prompted by the death of the actor Cory Montieth. I also have one planned about some of the blogs I've been reading, and websites I've been frequenting.

Also, I'm going to restart Homeschool Friday Posts on August 2nd with a 2012-2013 school year review. I'm not sure if I'm going to post weekly or biweekly yet, but we'll find out soon. :)

And, just for fun, here are some of the songs I've thumbed up on Pandora today:


1. Collide by Howie Day

2. How to Save a Life by The Fray

3. Wonderwall by Oasis

4. If You Could Only See by Tonic

5. All For You by Sister Hazel

6. Roll to Me by Del Amitri